Sidney Sutcliffe, the Edinburgh-born oboist who rose to fame alongside Dennis Brain as a member of the Philharmonia Orchestra in the 1950s, has died, aged 82. Nicknamed Jock by his London colleagues, he was one of a galaxy of fine wind players who helped make Walter Legge's great orchestra a success under Herbert von Karajan's conductorship after the Second World War.
Though initially trained as a cellist, Sutcliffe changed instruments in the band of the King's Royal Rifle Corps, which needed an oboist. The move led to a career he had never envisaged. As a pupil of the distinguished Leon Goossens at the Royal College of Music in London, he learned that there was another, more refined, side to oboe playing, but his experience as a bandsman proved invaluable in his series of appointments with some of Britain's best orchestras.
These included the London Philharmonia and the BBC Symphony Orchestra for seven years. With the latter he took part in two major Stravinsky concerts at the 1967 Edinburgh Festival, in one of which Pierre Boulez conducted The Rite of Spring and the European premiere of the Requiem Canticles.
Yet it was not only as an outstanding orchestral player that he was revered. In chamber music he was equally in demand. He established a niche in the Mozart repertoire as leader of the London Oboe Quartet, and his contribution to the Karajan recording of the Sinfonia Concertante is a collectors' item.
Following in Goossens's footsteps, he taught for 20 years at the Royal College of Music and became a sought-after orchestral coach, before reverting, towards the end of his life, to teaching cello at the Yehudi Menuhin School.
Sidney Sutcliffe, oboist;
born October 6, 1918,
died July 5, 2001
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